A data center may be defined as a location, for example, a room that houses equipment such as computer systems arranged in a number of racks. A standard rack, for example, an electronics cabinet, is defined as an Electronics Industry Association (EIA) enclosure, 78 in. (2 meters) wide, 24 in. (0.61 meter) wide and 30 in. (0.76 meter) deep. These racks are configured to house a number of computer systems, about forty (40) systems, with future configurations of racks being designed to accommodate 200 or more systems. The computer systems typically dissipate relatively significant amounts of heat during the operation of the respective components. For example, a typical computer system comprising multiple microprocessors may dissipate approximately 250 W of power. Thus, a rack containing forty (40) computer systems of this type may dissipate approximately 10 KW of power.
Efficient environmental control of a data center requires detailed knowledge of environmental conditions through the data center. Thus, sensors are typically positioned throughout the data center to detect temperature, pressure, humidity, or mass flow rates of air. In order to detect these conditions with a relatively high degree of granularity, large numbers of sensors are required to be placed throughout the data center. The sensors are typically configured to transmit detected condition information to a particular computing or monitoring device that acts as a data center controller to control environmental actuators for the data center. For example, the controller is used to control computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units that operate to deliver cool air to the data center to keep computer systems therein from overheating.
Because of the relatively large number of sensors typically employed in a data center, the data center controller must be configured to provide association between the sensor readings and the sensor position. Also, in a dynamic environment of the data center, where equipment is added to or removed from the data center to accommodate dynamic information technology (IT) needs, associated sensors also must be added to or removed from the data center. Thus, there is a need to track the addition and removal of sensors in the data center so as to configure the sensors accordingly before they are used by the data collection system.
Conventionally, sensor configuration tasks are typically handled by one of two methods, local hardware configuration or table-based remote software configuration. Both of these methods are labor intensive and error prone. In local hardware configuration, sensor identifying information is set by a physical switch or by manipulation of the register setting on the sensor to provide sufficient sensor configuration details for proper assembly. This requires a trained sensor installer with detailed knowledge of settings and global installation design. This method also requires hardware switches or programmable memory and programming devices for each setting change. In table-based remote software configuration, a remote database is used to track configuration parameters. Settings are often manually determined and input into the database. This method requires real time cooperation between the sensor installer and the database maintainer.
It would be beneficial to more efficiently configure sensors as they are added to or removed from a network.